Title: Simulation of a single product supply chain model with ARENA

Authors: Abbas Miranzadeh; Sayed Mojtaba Sajadi; Mohammad Mehdi Tavakoli

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran ' Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract: The increasing rise in competitiveness and efforts made toward the survival of organisations in the fast pace present-day world, serve as the principal motivations that force managers at different levels of supply chains to study and improve the chain processes so that the requested products reach the end customers with high quality and in a shorter time. Since simulation tools are much cheaper to use than analytical methods, and are suitable for demonstrating the real behaviour of systems in a short period of time, they can considerably help the managers of complex systems such as supply chains to improve their performance. In this study, a supply chain consisting of the three levels of raw-material supplier, manufacturer and end customers was simulated on the basis of the relationship among the different levels of the chain and by means of the ARENA software. The results showed that the largest number of requests waiting was related to the initial contract queue. In addition, requests for products have a longer waiting time at this station. Therefore, this section requires more improvement than the other sections of the supply chain.

Keywords: single product supply chains; simulation; ARENA; supply chain management; SCM; initial contract queue; waiting times.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2015.065943

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2015 Vol.19 No.1, pp.18 - 33

Received: 24 Apr 2013
Accepted: 10 Jul 2013
Published online: 30 Nov 2014 *

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